Jim Lesurf writes:
Richard Kettlewell wrote:
A common configuration is for /tmp to be a tmpfs. People who don't make
it a tmpfs presumably don't care... Put another way there's a limit to
how much policy your program should be setting; rather, it should be
following the user's policy.

If I understand that correctly it sums up one of the reasons for my
problem.

Under RO I'm used to ram: being the standard place for "temporary files
held in ram". But with the Mint boxes I have the temp 'device' seems to be
in /run, not /tmp. And presumably the assigned 'directory name' will vary
from one distro to another.

These paths don’t identify a particular kind of fileystem; they identify
what kind of files should be put there. In particular, /tmp (or
$TMPDIR) is a location for temporary file.

If the operator wants, or does not want, to use a tmpfs for temporary
files, that’s up to them. There’s no such thing as a path which is
guaranteed to be a tmpfs; what filesystems are used where is down to
local policy.

WRT mkstemp() I'm not clear if it gives the full pathname of the file. And
I had the impression that the file might then vanish as soon as flac quit
after saving it when run by a system() call, so leaving nothing for me to
read with my main program.

mkstemp fills in a template, so it gives a full path if you supply a
template that will give a full path. It doesn’t delete the file; that’s
for you to do when you’re finished with it.

--
http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/